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Elizabeth Warren’s Big Win

The 8/10 Bar & Grille on Norwood Street, just off the main drag in the unglamorous Boston suburb of Everett, is an old-school red-sauce Italian place: lots of TV sets tuned to ESPN; fake fireplace flickering behind the bar; Sinatra album covers—“Robin and the 7 Hoods,” etc.—on the walls between posters of the Rat Pack and the Godfather; a box of Keno (the Massachusetts lottery) forms and stubby pencils tucked behind the red-pepper flakes on every table, and a menu of pasta and pizza whose excellence is reflected in the happy amplitude of the proprietor, Richard Sasso. When the Harvard bankruptcy-law expert Professor Elizabeth Warren stopped into the 8/10 one cold and gloomy afternoon last January, Sasso didn’t mind telling his patrons that he’d never heard of her before an advance team from her campaign had told him that she was on the way. “So that’s what she looks like,” he said, when the street door opened, and her blond bob appeared.

To aficionados of financial regulation, and devotees of “The Daily Show,” Warren was already something of a superstar, but when she decided, as a sixty-two-year-old grandmother, to run for elected office for the first time as a candidate for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, she was almost entirely unknown to the lumpen Democrats whom she needed to vote for her. And so, more than a year ago, she started campaigning, haunting joints like the 8/10, day after day.

On entering, Warren spotted a schoolgirl among the local politicians who had gathered to receive her, and went for her. “I’m Elizabeth Warren,” she told the youngster, extending her hand, and bending down to make eye contact. “And I’m running for the United States Senate. Because that’s what girls do. Remember that. It’s important.”

To the adults, she recited bullet points from her populist stump speech—a cheerfully pugnacious lament of American decline:

“I feel like Washington works for people who have an army of lobbyists but it doesn’t work for people with families.”

“When I was young, we were building for a future. We were building infrastructure. We were building schools. You know—but right now China is building while we ”

“The idea that we can take on two wars and ask our children to pay for it—that’s not the kind of country we are.”

“Scott Brown, my opponent”— he was the incumbent—“when these three jobs bill came up, Brown voted against them. It’s the small businesses that suffer.”

Sasso liked the sound of that. He got himself photographed with Warren. “That’s where the recovery’s gotta come from, the small businesses,” he told her. But when she moved on, working her way through downtown Everett, introducing herself to people and asking for their votes, Sasso said, “Tell you the truth, I’ve got no problem with Scott Brown—or with her. But the thing is, she didn’t say what she’s going to do for me.”

Warren’s campaign against Brown was one of the hardest and most expensively fought of this election year, and for Democrats Warren’s big win yesterday was one of the sweetest victories of a very good night for the Party. She defeated Brown fifty-four to forty-six per cent. Going back through my notes from the early days of the race, I was reminded that when I chatted with Sasso, a sign hung behind him on the cluttered wall of the 8/10—“our mission statement,” he told me: “WINNERS ARE SIMPLY WILLING TO DO WHAT LOSERS WON’T.” I wondered: Was that a boast or a warning—or both?